If school hasn’t started for you yet, it will be soon. You may be looking forward to having your child in school all day, or you may be dreading the start of the school year because of the fights at and with the school.

In most cases, the younger the child, the more enabling the teacher can be. Many teachers don’t want a child to “fail” while they’re young. There is fear it will damage a child’s self esteem. In my experience and opinion, it is much more damaging to a child to fail in high school than in first grade.

I have talked to many parents who deal with the same issue. Their child “forgets” to do the homework, leaves it on the bus, loses it in the locker or whatever, and the child is given numerous chances to redo the work and receives full credit. How is this helpful to our kids? Most of our kids will take full advantage of this and never do the work to begin with or tell the parents that there was no homework, then do the work half heartedly at the last minute.

Another area in which this harms a child is that the teachers don’t get an accurate assessment of the child’s work and intelligence. If the child is rushing to do the work at the last minute are they doing the best job possible? Not in the kids I have worked with. This can make the child appear far less intelligent than what is really going on. I know so many parents who fight to convince the teacher how intelligent their child is but the child puts forth minimum effort in school and convinces the teacher that the child is not capable of doing the work.

The other thing that happens is that parents get pulled into a power struggle with their child over homework. Parents have actually received notes home chiding them for their child not having the homework done. It is not the parents’ responsibility, it is the child’s. Family time is for working on becoming a family. If a child is building up a big power struggle over homework, it is in everyone’s best interest for the parents to step back and not be pulled into it. Our kids need to be part of a family more than they need an “A” on a spelling test.

Many teachers and school districts assume that all children have access to computers and internet. There are children that you don’t want to have internet access. Sammy downloaded porn while he was working on our computer with me sitting at a separate desk right next to him. He didn’t realize what I could see. He even got past the filters on the school computers. For reasons like this, many parents really limit the amount of time their kids have on the computer, and rightfully so. However, many teachers just assume that the parents will allow their child to use these resources.

There are plenty of good teachers out there, but the ones who don’t get it or don’t want to get it can make life miserable for so many families. Kids need to learn while the price is small and sometimes all they are learning is manipulation.



Photo credit